Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about AEOTrack and Answer Engine Optimization. Can't find your answer? Contact us.
AI Visibility & Citations
How do I get more citations from ChatGPT and Perplexity?
- Earn third-party sources. AI engines answer by synthesising several pages at once — in our own measurements an engine that cited a brand's site consulted 7.7 other sources alongside it, so the brand's own page was about 11% of the evidence. Editing your own site alone rarely moves a citation rate. What moves it is appearing in the roundups, comparison posts, community threads and review pages the engines already read for your category. Find those with a source gap analysis: list the domains that get cited when a competitor is recommended and have never cited you, then work down that list.
How do I know if AI assistants trust my content?
- Look at whether engines cite you as a source, not just whether they mention you. A mention can come from training data; a citation means the engine retrieved your page and treated it as checkable. The strongest trust signals are third-party corroboration (other sites saying the same thing about you), specific verifiable facts rather than claims, visible author and organization identity, structured data that matches the visible page, and content that is kept current. A page that is retrieved often but never cited usually lacks a concrete, quotable fact.
How can I monitor when AI search cites my website?
- Citation tracking records every time an AI engine names your URL as a source, which engine did it, and for which question. It is a higher bar than a mention — the engine has to treat your page as a reference, not just recall your brand — so most sites see zero at first. AEOTrack logs each citation with the question that produced it, so you can see which pages earn references and which questions never surface you at all.
Crawlers & Measurement
Why can't a JavaScript tracking snippet count AI crawlers?
- Because AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest request your HTML and leave, so a snippet that fires on page load never executes for them. A JavaScript-only bot counter therefore reports a small and unrepresentative fraction of real crawler traffic, and gives no signal that it is a fraction — the visits it misses look exactly like visits that never happened. Server logs have no such blind spot: every request appears whether or not anything ran client-side.
How do I track AI crawlers accurately?
- Read your CDN or edge access logs rather than relying on a browser snippet. AEOTrack ingests logs pushed from a Vercel Log Drain or a Cloudflare Logpush job, identifies known AI crawler user-agents, and records the path and the status code each one received. The status code matters: a 403 to GPTBot or a 404 to a crawler is a finding on its own, and it is structurally invisible to a JavaScript beacon, which by definition only runs on pages that rendered successfully.
What is the difference between branded and non-branded AI visibility?
- A branded question already contains your name, so an engine mentioning you proves little about whether it would recommend you unprompted. A non-branded question is one a buyer asks before they know any brand names — and that is the only kind that measures organic discovery. The distinction matters most for brands named after their category, where the ordinary phrasing of the category contains the brand once spacing is ignored, and an engine retrieves you for spelling reasons rather than reputation. AEOTrack classifies every tracked question and, since scoring version 9, builds the headline score only from the neutral ones, with the branded questions scored beside it.
How do enterprises monitor AEO across multiple AI platforms and brands?
- By tracking each brand as its own workspace with its own question set, competitors and schedule, then comparing them on the same metrics. The things that matter at multi-brand scale are per-engine breakdowns (engines disagree sharply — one may name you consistently while another never does), share of voice against a named competitor set, scheduled checks so the data is a trend rather than a snapshot, and role-based access so each team sees its own brands. AEOTrack tracks 1 website on Starter (more at $15/month each), 3 on Pro, 10 on Agency and a custom number on Enterprise.
How do I benchmark my AI visibility against competitors?
- Compare share of voice on the same questions, not on separate ones. Share of voice is your mentions as a proportion of all tracked brands' mentions across the same set of AI answers, so it moves when your position genuinely changes rather than when you add more questions. Useful alongside it: average position within the answer (being named first is not the same as being named), and a per-engine breakdown, because a competitor can dominate one engine and be absent from another.
AEO Basics
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing your website content so that AI-powered search engines — like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok — can find, understand, and cite your content in their generated answers. Unlike traditional SEO which focuses on ranking in link-based results, AEO ensures your brand appears when users ask AI assistants questions about your industry.
How does aeotrack.io track AI visibility?
- AEOTrack (aeotrack.io) queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok with keywords relevant to your business, then reports whether your brand, content, or URLs appear in the responses. You get an AI visibility score, citation counts per engine, and a plan ordered by how often each issue shows up in your answers.
How is this different from traditional SEO tools?
- Traditional SEO tools focus on Google's link-based results — rankings, backlinks, keywords. AEOTrack focuses on AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok), which capture a growing share of search. We measure whether AI engines cite your content and help you optimize for machine comprehension and citation — not just classic SEO.
What is the best AEO tracker in 2026?
- It depends on what you need. Judge any tracker on which engines it asks, whether it asks with live web search on, whether it separates being cited from being named, how often it checks and what each answer costs. AEOTrack asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok with live web search on, every week, from $39 a month, and is built around agencies with white-label reports. Some rivals check daily or sell to enterprises; the comparison page at aeotrack.io/compare lists them with the date each was checked.
Is there a free AEO checker I can use without signing up?
- Yes. The free AEO audit at aeotrack.io/audit needs no account. Enter your website and work email to see whether ChatGPT and Perplexity named you for a question your buyers ask, every business they named instead, with a link to its own site when the answer gave one, their full answers and the pages they read, with a link to ask the same question yourself, plus a separate site hygiene check of your homepage. The fix steps, your other buyer questions and ongoing tracking come with the 7-day trial or a paid plan. Results in about a minute.
What does AEO tracking software do?
- AEO tracking software monitors whether AI answer engines mention your brand, cite your URLs, or recommend your competitors. AEOTrack's tracking software queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok with your keywords, calculates the AI visibility score and citation counts, and provides a plan ordered by how often each issue shows up in your answers.
How does an AEO analyzer work?
- An AEO analyzer crawls your webpage and evaluates how well it is optimized for AI answer engines. AEOTrack's analyzer checks content structure, FAQ coverage, schema markup (JSON-LD), readability, keyword targeting, and answer-readiness. It then produces a site hygiene score from 0-100 with a specific list of what to fix on the page. That is separate from the AI visibility score, which is read from what the engines actually answered.
Getting Started
What is AEOTrack?
- AEOTrack (aeotrack.io) is an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platform that tracks your brand's visibility in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok. You add your website and the questions your customers actually ask, and we report how often you're mentioned or cited — with the range to expect between two checks — along with the specific fixes that move it.
Is there a free plan?
- There's a 7-day free trial on the Starter plan's limits, checked daily while you use it, with no credit card required: 1 website, 25 tracked questions, 10 topics, 10 competitors and 15 on-demand re-checks for all 7 days. Onboarding sets up 10 questions to start; you can add up to 25. The trial lasts 7 days from when you add your website, not from sign-up. There's no permanent free tier — real checks mean real queries against five paid AI APIs, one answer per engine per question on every check. When the trial ends your account becomes read-only: nothing is deleted, and picking a plan resumes everything. The trial is not extended, and each website gets one trial. The free AEO Audit at aeotrack.io/audit asks for your website and work email and shows the full evidence for one buyer question in about a minute — no account needed.
How do I get started?
- Sign up at aeotrack.io, add your website URL and the questions your buyers ask (we suggest them from your site), and we'll run your first visibility check automatically. Your first answers arrive about 7 minutes after you add your website (the median for new accounts). You can also run a free one-off audit at aeotrack.io/audit without creating an account.
Do I need technical skills to use AEOTrack?
- No. AEOTrack is built for marketers, content creators, and business owners. Setup needs only your website address. The dashboard uses plain-language explanations and prioritized action steps. The FAQ Schema Generator produces copy-paste-ready JSON-LD markup.
AI Visibility Tracking
Which AI engines does AEOTrack monitor?
- Five on every plan: OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI and xAI's Grok, on every plan and on the trial. Each check calls the AI tool through its API with live web search on, in a fresh session with no chat history, memory or sign-in. Your own chat is personalised and varies from ask to ask, so it can answer differently. Why your own chat may answer differently. We report mentions and citations per engine so you can see where to focus.
How often are visibility checks run?
- Every paid plan runs scheduled weekly checks of everything you track automatically, so your visibility is tracked without you clicking anything. On top of that, every paid plan monitors a pinned set of questions daily: 3 on Starter, 10 on Pro, 25 on Agency, and everything on Enterprise. During the 7-day free trial, every question and topic you track is checked daily while you use it: a day's check runs when someone on your account opened AEOTrack the day before. On-demand re-checks come from a monthly pool — 15 on Starter and on the trial, 60 on Pro, 200 on Agency, 500 on Enterprise — and beyond the pool: monthly plans pay $0.50 per extra re-check, no hard wall; annual plans get 10 extra re-checks a month included, then upgrade or wait for the next month. One re-check queries every configured engine, and each question has a 24-hour cooldown so you aren't paying for noise.
What is an AI visibility score?
- Your AI visibility score (0–100) measures more than whether you were mentioned. A mention earns a baseline, then adds points for how high you rank in the answer, whether the engine cites your site as a source, and how positively it describes you. Engines are combined by weight, one live answer per engine per question, and the score is shown with a range (for example 62 ±8). The range is what to expect between two checks, so a move inside it is normal variation, not a change in your visibility.
What is citation tracking?
- Citation tracking monitors when AI engines explicitly link to or reference your URLs as sources in their answers. It shows which pages are most cited, on which engines, and for which queries — so you know exactly which content to double down on.
Scores & the Free Audit
What is the free AEO Audit?
- A free check of one buyer question, with the evidence. The audit at aeotrack.io/audit asks ChatGPT and Perplexity a question your buyers ask and shows the exact question and when it was asked, whether each one named you, every business each named instead, with a link to its own site when the answer gave one, each full answer, the pages they read and a link to ask the same question yourself. A separate site hygiene check grades your homepage's code and content; it is not your AI visibility score. The fixes, your other buyer questions and daily tracking come with the 7-day trial or a paid plan. About a minute; no account, and every result has a shareable page. What the result shows, explained.
How are the two scores calculated?
- There are two scores, and they measure different things. The AI visibility score (0–100, shown on your dashboard) is built from what the AI engines actually answered: whether you were named, where in the answer, whether your site was cited, and how positively, combined across engines and shown with the range to expect between two checks. The free audit's site hygiene score is different: it grades your own page — content structure, schema markup, readability and answer-readiness — and moves the moment you publish a fix. Improving the site hygiene score helps engines read you; only the AI visibility score tells you whether they recommend you.
Why is my score 0 when my audit grade was B?
- They measure different things: the audit grade is a site hygiene checklist for your homepage (how easy it is for AI engines to read), and the score is visibility (whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok actually named you in their answers to the questions you track). A well-built page can still be one no engine names: the grade describes the page, and the score describes the answers. How the score is calculated.
Why does my score start at 0, and what do I do?
- A 0 means none of the five engines named you in their answers to the questions checked. It is common for a new or small brand: the engines name the businesses they find clear, consistent evidence for on the sites they read. What to do: 1) let AI crawlers in and put your key facts (who you serve, what you do, where, prices) in plain text on your site; 2) answer each main buyer question on its own page, in the first lines; 3) get onto the sites the engines read for those questions, such as directories, review sites and comparison lists; 4) describe your business the same way everywhere; 5) re-check weekly and give it 4 to 6 weeks. The full guide. The per-question tasks, the list of sources and tracking the movement need the 7-day trial or a paid plan.
What is the 6-week plan?
- On every paid plan, the Weekly plan in the app lays your action plan out over 4 to 6 weeks: 6 when your score starts below 15, 5 when it starts below 40, otherwise 4. Each week has up to three tasks, each with the site or page it targets, built from your own questions, the sources the engines read and the competitors they name. It shows an estimated score band for what typically happens if the tasks are done (an estimate, not a guarantee), then plots your real weekly score against it so you can see the movement. The 7-day trial shows week one in full and the later weeks in outline; the free audit shows the week titles. How the plan is built · Help: the weekly plan.
How do I improve my AI visibility score?
- Get onto the sites AI reads when it names a rival and not you: the roundup lists, directories, review sites and threads the engines cite for your questions. AEOTrack's plan leads with those sites, ranked by evidence (how often each engine read them), not by a promised effect. On your own site, answer the questions buyers ask in plain text with specific facts the engines can quote, and keep it current. Structured data, FAQ markup and llms.txt are a short hygiene checklist, not visibility levers.
Content & Optimization Tools
What is the FAQ Generator?
- The FAQ Generator takes any URL and produces 10 AEO-optimized questions and answers based on your page content. It generates ready-to-deploy JSON-LD FAQ Page schema markup that you can add to your site's <head> to help AI engines find and cite your answers.
What is the Content Optimizer?
- The Content Optimizer analyzes your page and rewrites or suggests improvements to make it more answer-engine friendly — better structured, more concise, with clearer answers. It's included on every plan — Starter includes 50 optimizer and FAQ generations a month, Pro and above are unlimited.
What is SERP Monitoring?
- SERP Monitoring tracks your organic Google ranking for a keyword next to your AI visibility for the same topic, so you can see whether classic search and AI answers move together. It reads the organic results only — it does not read Google AI Overviews. Available on Pro and higher plans.
What is Competitor Intelligence?
- Competitor Intelligence lets you compare your AI visibility score against competitor domains. See which competitors are cited more often by AI engines, on which queries, and what content they have that you don't — so you can close the gap. Included on every plan: Starter and Pro track up to 10 competitors, Agency 25 and Enterprise has no limit.
Billing & Plans
How does billing work?
- Paid plans are billed monthly or annually — annual billing gives you two months free (pay for 10 months, get 12). You can cancel anytime from your Billing page; your plan remains active until the end of the billing period you have already paid for. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first monthly payment, and other payments for a billing period already started are not refunded in part. All payments are processed securely by Stripe.
Do referral rewards extend the free trial?
- No. The free trial is not extended. A free month you earn through the referral program while you are on the trial is kept and comes off your first paid month; one you earn after you subscribe goes on your next invoice. The referred company's first payment is what earns it, for both sides. Referral terms.
Can I upgrade or downgrade my plan?
- Yes. Upgrades apply immediately from your Billing page — the new features are available right away and you pay only the prorated difference for the rest of the current billing period. Downgrades take effect at the start of your next billing period: you keep your current plan until then, and nothing is refunded or credited.
Is there a refund policy?
- Yes, a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first monthly payment: if AEOTrack is not worth it to you, write to support@aeotrack.io within 30 days of that payment and we refund it in full, for any reason. The refund goes back to the card you paid with within 5 business days of your request, and the plan is cancelled. Annual plans are not covered for accounts created from 24 October 2026. A charge made in error, such as a duplicate or a renewal after you cancelled, is always refunded in full. Other payments for a billing period that has already started are not refunded in part. The full terms are in section 9 of the Terms of Service.
Do you offer annual pricing?
- Yes. Every plan has an annual option with two months free — Starter is $390 a year ($33/mo billed annually), Pro $990 a year ($83/mo) and Agency $2,490 a year ($208/mo); Enterprise is billed annually from $799/mo. Switch the toggle on the pricing page, or change it from your Billing page at any time.
Privacy & Security
How does AEOTrack handle my data?
- We store your account information, website configurations, and analysis results securely in MySQL with encryption in transit (TLS/SSL). We do not sell your personal data. Website URLs you submit are processed via AI APIs (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Perplexity and xAI Grok) for analysis, consistent with their privacy policies.
Is my payment information secure?
- Yes. All payments are processed by Stripe, a PCI DSS Level 1 certified provider. We never store your credit card details on our servers.
How do I whitelist AEOTrack’s crawler?
- Allow the User-Agent AEOTrackBot (currently AEOTrackBot/1.0) in your firewall, CDN or robots.txt — that covers every fetch AEOTrack itself makes when it analyzes your pages. The AI engines are separate: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok read your site with their own crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended and GoogleOther), and blocking those stops AI engines from reading and citing you at all. A ready-to-paste robots.txt allowing all of them is at aeotrack.io/downloads/robots-ai-bots.txt.
How can I delete my account?
- You can request account deletion by emailing privacy@aeotrack.io. We'll delete your personal data within 30 days. Anonymized, aggregated analytics may be retained for product improvement.
What is the difference between being cited and being mentioned in an AI answer?
- Cited means the engine retrieved one of your URLs while composing the answer. Mentioned means your brand name appears in the text a person actually reads. They are separate events and they fail for opposite reasons. Across 446 tracked answers for one domain, 15% cited the site but only 9% named it, and on one engine 22 answers cited the site without naming it once. AEOTrack reports the two numbers separately per question and per engine, because a single blended “visibility” figure hides the gap between them.
Why do AI engines cite my site but still recommend a competitor?
- Because your page is only part of the evidence. When an engine cited one tracked domain it consulted an average of 7.7 other sources alongside it, so that site was roughly an eighth of the material behind the answer — and if the other sources name a competitor, the engine takes the facts from you and the recommendation from them. This is a corroboration problem, not a crawling one: more schema markup or another rewrite will not change it. The fix is to earn factual mentions on the domains the engine already retrieves for your questions.
Measuring AEO Across AI Assistants
How do I track AEO mentions in ChatGPT and Gemini?
- Ask each engine the questions your buyers actually ask, on a schedule, and record two separate things: whether your brand is named in the answer, and whether your URL is cited as a source. They are not the same signal — a mention can come from training data, while a citation means the engine retrieved your page and treated it as checkable. Doing this by hand fails for a specific reason: AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single check is an anecdote, not a rate. You need the same question asked repeatedly before the number means anything. AEOTrack asks your questions on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, stores every answer, and reports mention rate and citation rate per question per engine.
How do I measure AEO performance in AI search results?
- With two rates, measured per question and per engine: how often the engine names your brand (mention rate) and how often it cites your site as a source (citation rate). Track both, because they move independently — it is common to sit near 30% mentions and under 5% citations, which means the engines know who you are but do not treat your pages as evidence. Report the numbers with a range rather than as a single figure, since answers change between checks and one check is a reading, not a trend. A useful measurement also records which other domains were cited alongside you, because that list is the work: those are the sources the engine already trusts for your category.
How do enterprises handle AEO monitoring across AI platforms?
- The same measurement, with more structure. At scale it becomes one tracked question set per brand or product line, run on a schedule across every engine that matters, with results split by engine rather than averaged — engines disagree far more than most teams expect, and a blended score hides that. Add alerting that fires only when a score moves outside its noise band, competitor share-of-voice on the same questions, and citation-source tracking so you can see which third-party domains the engines read for your category. The parts that scale badly are all manual: a person pasting questions into five chat windows cannot produce a rate, cannot cover several brands, and cannot separate a real drop from run-to-run variance.
What are the alternatives to manual AEO tracking methods?
- Manual tracking means opening ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, pasting a question into each, and noting whether you were mentioned. It has three failure modes, not one: AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single run is an anecdote rather than a rate; personalisation and chat history skew what you see against what a stranger sees; and the effort grows with questions multiplied by engines multiplied by weeks, so it stops the first time you are busy. The alternatives fall into three groups. Scheduled automated checks ask the same questions on a schedule and report a rate with a range. Log-based crawler tracking tells you which AI crawlers actually fetched your pages, but not what any engine said about you. Brand-monitoring tools watch the open web rather than the engines, which is useful but does not answer whether an assistant recommends you. AEOTrack is the first kind.
What is the best AEO tracking software for AI assistants?
- It depends on what you need to prove, and an honest answer names more than one tool. If the question is whether assistants recommend you and cite you, judge a tool on: which assistants it covers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok), whether it reports mention rate and citation rate separately, whether it breaks results down per engine instead of blending them, whether it shows a range with each score so you can tell a real change from normal variation, and whether it records the other sources cited alongside you. The category includes AEOTrack, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Semrush's AI toolkit and BrightEdge; they differ mainly in engine coverage, whether citations are measured at all, and price. AEOTrack's own difference is that it measures AEO and GEO separately and reports intervals rather than one number.
What are the best AEO platforms for AI content optimization?
- Measurement and optimization are different jobs, and most tools do one of them well. A platform aimed at AI content optimization should do three things: show you which questions you are invisible for, show you what the engines cited instead of you, and give you a change you can actually make — schema that matches your visible copy, an answer-first rewrite, an FAQ block that mirrors questions people really ask. Be sceptical of anything that promises to optimize for AI without showing the measurement underneath, because the only proof an optimization worked is the mention or citation rate moving afterwards. Tools in this space include AEOTrack, Profound, Peec AI and Otterly; Semrush and BrightEdge come at it from traditional SEO.
Still have questions?
Our team is happy to help. Email us at support@aeotrack.io and we'll reply by email.